Brooklyn College, Steiner plan film school

Grad school to be housed at Steiner Studios

TV and film production facility Steiner Studios is partnering with the film department at Brooklyn College to house the college’s new film grad school within its walls. “It will be the only graduate school in film embedded on a working lot,” said Studios prexy Douglas C. Steiner.

Brooklyn College, part of the City University of New York system, will offer a program headed by professor Daniel Gurskis, a screenwriter and playwright who has also penned an instructional text on scriptwriting. Because CUNY is a public school, the grad program will be significantly cheaper than comparable degrees at local film schools like Columbia’s School of the Arts and NYU’s Tisch.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg made fleeting reference to the new program in his “State of the City” address yesterday, calling it “the first graduate level film school of its kind.”

“It’ll be affordable and will contribute to further diversification of the industry, which I think will contribute to a better product,” Steiner said. “Part of why everyone thinks it’s a good idea is that getting your foot in the door is really important in what is essentially a freelance business – you need to make connections, and we will facilitate those.”

Steiner, Gurskis and other school and studio officials will work out with individual film productions the level of involvement desired with the students. “We’ll have a system for people to drop on for access and part-time work. It’s not just the formal process, it’s the informal process that leads to business opportunities.”